"I discovered Linux only a year ago. I found it
immediately attractive, not because of its technical prowess (I'm not a
techie), but because the thinking of the community that surrounds it echoes
principles I work with every day as a family therapist. I actually read the
side of the (then) Red Hat 5.0 box and said, "I got it."

"Cute! I'll bet that horse made great glue."

"Right on the money except for one thing: Solitaire has
crashed on me."

"Hi. Thanks for your great article! You made the point,
very clearly and with the right tone: I understand your anger about those
GUI-addicted users... I have to fight with 'em and their small brains almost
everyday..."

"Here, Here!!! tell it like it is... I have to use
windowz at work and management refuses to look at Linux at all. What a
waist....."

"You're absolutely right: The command line is BETTER
than a GUI for most purposes."

"I think it was at the Yerkes Institute for Primate Studies, or
some such place, where they showed that chimpanzees can be taught to
communicate, after a fashion, by pointing at colored chips glued to a panel.
Sort of like a point-and-click, drag-and-drool computer interface. Human beings
ought to be able to do better. You can teach a chimp to use symbols, but you
can't teach it to use SYNTAX. That's the critical difference between the
command line and a GUI. If you can deal with syntax, you can express ideas that
you can't express without it. I think it was Bertrand Russell who remarked
that, no matter how much a dog barks, he can never tell you his father was poor
but honest. In the same way, you can say things through a command that you can
never, ever say through a GUI."

"I hate to resort to movie analogies, but I can't help but
think of Microsoft as "The Matrix," and the *NIX community as
Morpheus. If you've seen the flick I think you know what I mean. The
complacency of "fat, dumb and happy" Windows users is sickening--I
can say that, I used to be one, but I woke up in a big tub of nasty-looking goo
when I discovered Linux and I've never looked back. Eek, that was kind of
sappy, but it works for me."

"Nice article, made a good
laugh :-)

On the subject of teaching kids the "standard" in schools:

Back in the old days I was taught MS-DOS, because our school was not
equipped with anything better than XTs.

After changing school some years later, they showed us Win 3.1. The
thing was, in between I had got an impression on how a robust OS and a
responsive GUI should look like (Amiga OS {2,3}.x and Linux 2.x). And compared
to that Win 3.1 was a total piece of crap. But it was the standard at the
students had to learn it because it was important for later life.

So now most of my class mates have finished school and started working.
And hey - they even use Windows at their jobs. Win 95, 98, or NT. But they
never saw that beast in school, so they have learn it all over again. Great. At
my job we even use OS/2 Warp. According to what I learned in school, this does
not even exist.

UNIX knowledge on the other hand does not outdate that fast. And Windows
prevents many people from becoming hackers in the first place. They can go on
for years without ever seeing a CLI. I'm wondering why the term
"clickers" hasn't be coined yet :-) "

Variations, including a version of the rant mode filter in Perl:

"What the click-happy Windows users don't realize is
just how horrifying things are just below that candy wrapper exterior with all
those rows of pretty buttons....

There's an ugly little monster lurking in the quagmire at the heart of
Windows, and its name is The Registry. Its form and contents are a hundred
times more arcane than any part of UNIX. All the precious bits that make all
those apps run are jostled up against each other with no supervision and no
rhyme or reason, and the accepted cure for any misstep in the Registry, any
minor infraction made by any app, is to reformat and reload the system from
scratch....

Just for fun, here's a functionally equivalent copy of your rant filter,
written in Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl -pi
# Pathetic mail filter for rant mode equals one

s/gui/panty-waist interface/ig;
s/graphic/Lamer/ig;

And, since your filter might make that one unreadable, here's a copy it can't
touch: